announcing /r/about and the reddit postcards gallery

Have you ever tried to describe the reddit community to someone? Where would you begin?

As the reddit community grows in size and impact I think it’s increasingly important that we invest a little effort in sharing an outward-facing snapshot of what reddit is and the awesome things that we do.

Basically, the idea is to gather things we’d like to show the world when we tell them what reddit’s about. It’s a place to introduce reddit in reddit’s own words. A place to showcase reddit’s community, culture, and history, and a way to introduce roughly what we’re about to visitors who’ve never been here before.

/r/about

The most important part of the new about page is quotations from redditors and meetup photos. We’ve created a new subreddit for this purpose, /r/about, to share meetup photos, quotes, pontifications, and news clippings about reddit. This leads to what I hope will become a new reddit meetup tradition: sharing your meetup group photos on reddit.

One of the most amazing things about reddit is how it brings people together, and meetup photos are the perfect way to give everyone a chance to literally give a face to the community. However, we care deeply about respecting people’s privacy, and want to ensure that everyone featured in the photos consents to the image being released. In order to do that, we’d like you to take some new meetup photos with the about page in mind.

Are you going to Global reddit Meetup Day on June 23rd? Ask your posse if they’d like to take a group photo for the about page, and submit your photos to /r/about. We’ll feature our favorite shots and their respective meetups in the new slideshow.

new postcards gallery

Since the call for postcards about 2 years ago, reddit has received over 1000 postcards spanning over 100 different countries (including Antarctica and North Korea). Josh, our office artist, has painstakingly scanned every single one and photoshopped out any personal information for display. Here’s a video of him arranging them into a huge mosaic in our office:

We’ve received an amazing range of interesting, silly, and bizarre postcards, and they’re a ton of fun to explore. As part of the new about pages, we’ve created an online postcard viewer to share this reddit tradition. You can also now vote and comment on every one at /r/postcards.